Napoli patron Aurelio De Laurentiis broke his silence on when he decided to fire Gennaro Gattuso, hiring Luciano Spalletti and cutting costs including player sales. ‘Nobody is unsellable for the right proposal.’
The President forced everyone at the club into a press silence on February 21, but broke the damn with a lengthy press conference that covered everything from Gattuso’s dismissal to the arrival of Spalletti.
He began where the season ended, with a 1-1 draw against Hellas Verona that ruled Napoli out of the top four.
“Regret is the easiest path,” said De Laurentiis. “I went into the locker room at half-time and felt almost relaxed after we took the lead.
“I thought it was always a bit of a falsified tournament because of COVID and all the various restrictions, it was like playing football in an aquarium. I wish we’d all boycotted the Euros and forced them to postpone the start of the season.”
The 2022 World Cup in Qatar is moved to the winter, a plan that De Laurentiis called “the dumbest idea of the Century,” and reiterated he won’t release players for the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo.
Gattuso’s contract was running down and it had been evident for some months that neither he nor the club wanted to extend it.
De Laurentiis claims the rot began when Gattuso struggled with Ocular Myasthenia in December 2020, an auto-immune disease that can cause muscles around the eyes to weaken.
“I preferred to impose a press silence at a certain point, seeing some games where the coach was not in great shape and that he knew all the pundits on television who were doing the interviews, so it’s easy in those situations for him to fall into a trap.
“I never wanted to fire Gattuso, I saw him in pain with these glasses and he effectively wasn’t present on the bench. I even started to worry that if the situation deteriorated, we might have to intervene.
“I believed we’d qualify for the Champions League and I had prepared a statement for after the Verona game thanking him for that, but I needed to change it and thank him for the work done.
“The truth is, I had already decided to stop with Gattuso the previous summer, I’d only brought him in to fill the gap after Carlo Ancelotti’s exit. Even if he’d won the league, his mission with Napoli would’ve been concluded.”
Is it true that they had signed a contract of sorts and simply didn’t deposit it with the Lega Serie A?
“We signed a couple of lines, but these went to the lawyers and turned into 27 lines. I had already contacted Spalletti when Gattuso was ill, then fortunately he recovered, but the situation was clear by that stage.
“I had already spoken to Spalletti years ago, he’s a coach who knows how to organise his teams, dealing with difficult situations at Roma and Inter, with clubs that weren’t very clear.”
ADL denied he was ever invited to join the Super League project, but did warn something has got to change.
“We have to recognise that the budget has to be revised, or Napoli could go bankrupt. If you want to get Napoli back on track, you must cut excessive spending.
“Selling one player might not be enough, we’d need to sell those who vastly increased the wage bill. I probably shouldn’t have made a couple of signings, but I got over-excited and invested too much to lock myself down to a five-year contract that we cannot respect.
“Nobody is unsellable if the appropriate proposal comes along. Napoli’s objectives for this season are to balance the books and get back into the Champions League.”